How to Wow Your Neighbors with a Mix-in-a-jar

I recently discovered that you can wow people by giving them a mix in a mason jar.  It's one of the simplest gifts you can give to someone, and if you put the ingredients in a layer at a time, it ends up looking pretty cool, like so.

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Pretty cool, right?  All you have to do is attach instructions for turning the mix into a final product and you have yourself a pretty, inexpensive, homemade, delicious gift.  I gave my grandma a brownie mix for Mother's Day.  My grandpa got a cornbread mix for Father's Day.  They make great new neighbor gifts, Christmas presents for teachers...you get the idea.

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So how, pray tell, do you make one of these marvelous mixes?  Easy peasy.  Just take a recipe for something that you already love--for instance, the sweet cornbread recipe that I posted a while back.  Combine all of the dry ingredients, one at a time, making each layer flat before adding the next layer.  If you have way more of one ingredient than the rest (often flour or sugar), just split it up into two layers with another ingredient or two between to make it look prettier.  For the cornbread recipe, I added the dry ingredients in the following layers:

1/2 the flour

1/2 the cornmeal

White sugar

Salt

Baking powder

The other 1/2 of the flour

The other 1/2 of the cornmeal

Brown Sugar

As long as your ingredients are relatively the same texture, you can really put them in whatever order you like because they're just going to get mixed together eventually anyway.  The thing to keep in mind with layering is that you want to put the heavier ingredients toward the bottom and any ingredients that will have space between pieces (like chocolate chips or beans, for example) are on the top.  That way flour or whatever doesn't filter down in between them and make your layer look funny.  Making the layers vary from light to dark colors makes it look really nice too.  Just look how good these muffins in a jar look!

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When all of your layers are in place, put the lid on the jar, tie a ribbon on it, and include instructions for adding the rest of the ingredients and cooking it.  Bam!  That was easy.

You want to try it now, don't you?  Well, my culinary friend, here is a website that has tons of ideas for mixes in a jar to get you going.  Happy mixing!

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Chili in a jar, anyone?